Category Archive for: Windows Workflow Foundation

The code to host the WorkflowRuntime in a process will vary based on the application itself. For a Windows Forms application or a Windows Service, it is typical to construct the runtime at the start of the application and store this in a property of the main application class. application In response to some input in…

Two new activities are available with .NET 3.5 that support integration between workflows and WCE. These are the Send Activity and the Receive Activity. The Send Activity could more aptly be called the Call Activity, because what it does is issue a request to a WCF service and can optionally surface the results as parameters that can…

In order to start a workflow, it is necessary to create an instance of the WorkflowRuntime class. This is typically done once within your application, and this object is usually defined as a static member of the application so that it can be accessed anywhere within the application. When you start the runtime, it can then reload…

Up to this point, the chapter has concentrated on activities but has not discussed workflows. A workflow is simply a list of activities, and indeed a workflow itself is just another type of activity. Using this model simplifies the runtime engine, because the engine just needs to know how to execute one type of object – that being…

So far, you have used activities that are defined within the System. Workflow. Activities namespace. In this section, you learn how to create custom activities and extend these activities to provide a good user experience at both design time and runtime. To begin, you create a WriteLineActivity that can be used to output a line of text…

Everything in a workflow is an activity, including the workflow itself. The workflow is a specific type of activity that typically allows other activities to be defined within it – this is known as a composite activity, and you see other composite activities later in this chapter. An activity is just a class that ultimately derives from the…

Visual Studio 2008 contains built-in support for creating workflows, and when you open the New Project dialog you will see a list of workflow project types as shown in Figure 43-1. Select Sequential Workflow Console Application from the available templates (that will create a console application that hosts the workflow runtime) and a default workflow that you…

This chapter presents an overview of the Windows Workflow Foundation (known as WF throughout the rest of this chapter), which provides a model to define and execute processes using a set of building blocks called activities. WF provides a Designer hat, by default, is hosted within Visual Studio, and that allows you to drag and drop activities from…